Organic Valley GIVEAWAY WINNERS!

Yup, It is me, awake at 1am posting winners of the OV Giveaway. Note to self, when hosting a giveaway, allows comments through NOON rather than MIDNIGHT. Oh well, we gotta learn somehow. FYI, there was one accidental duplicate comment which was removed to allow everyone one entry.

Random.org gave me the following numbers for the year's supply of Organic Valley products: #16 Rachel P CONGRATS!!

For the Earth Dinner Books: #6 Michelle, #5 Anonymous (Dreamwvr1414) , #12 Bethany and #17 Teresa

For the reuseable totebag #20 Jill

Please email me by the end of Sunday April 24th at thetableofpromise(at)yahoo(dot)com with your shipping address to claim your prize.

Thanks again to Organic Valley for the fantastically generous giveaway. OV is doing great things for family farms and they bring a high quality product to market all across the country. Happy Eath Day and I hope that your Earth Dinner is deliciously local and sustainable!

Organic Valley Earth Dinner GIVEAWAY!!

This Friday April 22^nd is Earth Day 2011.

In case you were wondering, the very first Earth Day was April 22^nd, 1970. I found a lovely article written by former Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day. Nelson relates that Earth Day came about because of a disconnect between the people and the government regarding the importance of environmental concerns. The people were concerned about matters of conservation and environmental health while the political establishment was not. While at a conference in Seattle in 1969, Nelson announced that he was planning a grassroots environmental demonstration in the spring of 1970 that was open to everyone. The wire services carried the story from coast to coast and the response was electric. From that point on Nelson and his Washington DC staff organized demonstrations from their Senate office. But it soon became obvious that they could not organize the whole event. In the end 20 million people participated in the first Earth Day.

Earth Day is in its DNA a demonstration for environmental concerns. It is political and actionable. Earth Day is also open to all with no exclusions. And most importantly, Earth Day is an event that should be organized and carried out by the people. It should come from us, not the government.

Several sources I found online said that if everyone in the US would eat one local meal a week our country would save 1.1 million barrels of oil and 1.9 billion dollars would be pumped back into the economy. I cannot figure out which study first found out this statistic, so, sorry that there is no link back to it. But it seems to be the go to stat. National Geographic and Barbara Kingsolver and AgriGirl have all used it. So I feel it is pretty trustworthy. But jeez, 57 million barrels of oil a year? That is a lot! According to a University of Nebraska paper from what appears to be the late 90’s, US oil consumption stands at about 19.6 million barrels a day. Which means if we all had a local meal every week, we would save about 3 days worth of oil, or slightly less than 1% of our total annual supply. That might not sound like much to you. But to me that seems huge from just ONE thing, eating local.

Organic Valley recently challenged bloggers and their readers across the country to eat more locally by encouraging Earth Dinner. Earth Dinner is a completely local and organic meal that one can share with family and friends in conjunction with Earth Day. I think this is a beautiful way for anyone to deliciously celebrate Earth Day and support local business.

And just because they are pretty awesome, they are generously giving away to my readers:

1) One Year’s Worth of Free Organic Valley Products in the form of 52 free-product coupons ($520 value)

2) 4 Earth Dinner Books

3) And an Organic Valley reusable, packable shopping bag for carrying all those delicious Organic Valley goodies.

All you have to do to enter is “like” The OV Earth Dinner Facebook Page and comment down below that you did so. There is nothing else that you need to do, though signing up for my daily email or RSS feed would be a very polite thing to do to…I will choose 6 winners at random (through random.org) and will announce those winners on Earth Day Friday April 22, 2011. Here is to eating local!!!

This Post is part of Simple Lives Thursday at Sustainable Eats and GNOWFLINS

A Bad Good Day

Yesterday I had an especially busy day at my office. Client meetings, a little entertaining, one meeting pushed back and all of a sudden I found myself eating croissants for breakfast and burgers for lunch and then for dinner, a half eaten week old muffin. That is really what put me over the edge.

I have been keeping a really good pace recently. But if there was a day for food to go horribly wrong, today was an okay day. Overall, meetings went well, bad situations ended up benefiting me. Even though I was late catching my train it was particularly fast this morning and I got to work on time. You know, one of those. But the food was really good bad. I am pleased to say that my baker's muffin from The City Bakery was excellent. They use all organic flours, and it is only lightly sweetened, but sooo delicious. My customer wanted to order lunch today and so we got amazing burgers from a little bistro around the way. Oh My Goodness! I never get bacon on my burger, and today I didn't ask them to make it without it, so guess what!! And I finished the fries. They were amazing.

But Dinner was the worst. I was so full from the burger that I couldn't eat dinner with the kids. So I waited until later and by the time everyone was asleep I was so tired that all I could do was finish a half eaten muffin I had bought at the farmer's market last weekend.

The funny thing is, everything I ate was organic or high quality. But I am realizing that that isn't the point. It is great that I minimized my effect on the environment by supporting organic agriculture. But since I literally did not eat any vegetables, I definitely did not give my body the fuel that it needs. While I value organic farming a whole lot, my body's health and well being is actually more important. I think that is the moral of my story thus far. Healthy food, veggies, fruits, whole unprocessed grains, eating the right foods is more important that eating organic if your organic choices are going to be highly processed.

Organic and Biodynamic Wines

I don't have any pictures to show you, because unfortunately that is what wine does to me. It makes me crazy forgetful.

Last Friday I had some girlfriends over for some yummy homemade pizza, a great homemade white bean puree and organic wine. Unfortunately no one really drank the wine. Well, I say unfortunately, but actually it was very fortunate for me!! I got to indulge myself all weekend!

I went to a nearby wine store, Vines on Pine. (Follow the link for their website an yes they do ship) There are a couple of larger wine and spirit stores in our area, but they are 10-15 blocks in either direction. That's kind of far for just one bottle, and really far for five heavy bottles. They are great stores, but they have an intimidatingly large selection. I guess some people like all that choice. I would much rather a manageable selection of wines that I knew I could not make a mistake with. Enter Vines on Pine. They are a small locally owned store front on Pinehurst Avenue in Northern Manhattan. Their selection is tight, but every bottle that I have gotten there has been excellent. And the varietals have all been different and interesting, many from small farms or vinters. I have had some great bottles from the larger wineries at the $10-15 price point, but at Vines on Pine I get to try things that I never would choose on my own. That's because I always ask the gentleman who runs the store and makes the buy. He has a vast knowledge of his inventory and always suggests something great while staying within my price range.

So before my friends came over I asked him for help with organic wines. Surprisingly he had an extensive selection. Some wines in the store were labeled as organic or biodynamic (more on that later) and others were not labeled, but my new friend knew the vineyard was organic, even if it wasn't certified. One must take into consideration the international nature of wine in it's relationship to the organic movement. The legal term 'organic' is an American invention. Yes, I am sure that it came from a variety of places and countries. But when the USDA created the certification process and legally defined the term 'organic' to mean no pesticides and non chemical fertilizers, etc. it became a word with a specifically American meaning here in the US. Other countries have farming regulations, but when you buy a product in this country that is labeled 'organic' it needs to meet USDA Organic standards. Wines comes from everywhere. Many international vineyards are adhering to the USDA standards without purchasing the coveted USDA organic logo through certification. It can be prohibitively expensive for some small farms. I don't care about certification because food is about trust. If I am putting the fruits of your labor into my body, I need to trust you. And if I trust that you are being honest with me in telling me the way you grow and prepare my food, then we will do business. Fortunately at Vines on Pine I trust that they are knowledgeable on what is organic and not.

Now biodynamic farming is different. It has a more extensive definition, and I do not believe that this terminology is regulated by the USDA (at least not yet). But it BEYOND organic. Wikipedia describes it as:

"a method of organic farming that treats farms as unified and individual organisms, emphasizing balancing the holistic development and interrelationship of the soil, plants, animals as a self-nourishing system without external inputs insofar as this is possible given the loss of nutrients due to the export of food.
Regarded by some as the first modern ecological farming system and one of the most sustainable, biodynamic farming has much in common with other organic approaches, such as emphasizing the use of manures and composts and excluding of the use of artificial chemicals on soil and plants. Methods unique to the biodynamic approach include the use of fermented herbal and mineral preparations as compost additives and field sprays and the use of an astronomical sowing and planting calendar."

I have started to see a few places define themselves as biodynamic. Particularly our local Hawthorne Valley which I have mentioned a few times here on this blog. I will be sad the day that the USDA decides to regulate that term.

I purchased two reds and one white. The white was a Blanc de Pacs 2009 Parellada Xarello Macabeu from Spain. The reds were Mas de Gourgonnier Les Baux de Provence Appellation les Baux de Provence Controlee 2008 from France, and the other bottle got recycled before I could write down the title. They were all excellent.

Now I love wine, but I am really intimidated by the culture that surrounds it. My palette is relatively simple, and I cannot always distinguish between cherry and blackberry notes. I know what I like, not much wood, clean finish, drinkable with food but on it's on too. I really like a smooth mellow red, and for a white, something tart and crisp. All of the bottles that I got were excellent. One thing I dislike in a red wine is too many tannins. Tannins are of course that bitter taste that you get in the finish of the sip of red wine. I noticed that neither of the red wines had the bitter flavor of tannins. It seemed like a cleaner finish. I attribute this to less sulfites and a cleaner product.

Overall, I definitely tasted a difference in the organic and biodynamic wines. I will absolutely look for them again. Most of all I was really pleased with the amount of selection. Not just from my local store but from the wine industry in general. I was actually really surprised that there were so many vineyards adhering to better farming techniques. But I should have suspected it, after all, there are few as passionate as the winemaker. And those with passion tend to go the extra mile for a higher quality product.

Cheers!

Notes:
Biodynamic agriculture. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://www.wikipedia.org/ 23 June, 2010

If you search for happiness, don't go looking farther than your own back yard.

We finally found time today to go to Whole Foods. I mentioned a few days ago that I had been in search of some organic peanut oil. Well I decided that if I was going to go to Whole Foods for one item, I would just get everything there.

I had visions of isles of prefect and organic produce, all varieties of blissful fruits and vegetables. I expected 10 different varieties of organic tortillas and organic cheese to write home to my parents about. And I kind of found it, but I kind of didn't at the same time.

I did find beautiful fruits and veggies. Everything seemed to have a coat of gloss paint on it. But I was surprised to see that half of the produce was conventional and the other half organic. I did like that the store labels items that are local. Probably there are local varieties at Fairway, but they don't label them, so who will ever know?

I am a store brand shopper. I always try to buy everything from the store brand at Fairway, because it is cheaper and I think very high quality. Many of my friends do the same thing, I know the Fairway brand sells faster and so those goods are fresher. The Fairway brand is always clearly labeled as to whether the items are organic or not. At Whole Foods, I always thought that the 365 brand was always organic. It is not. And there were times that I found it hard to find the organic labeling on the packaging. Maybe that was just because I was looking for the label of organic and it wasn't there.

The most amazing thing though??? Price. I discovered that Whole Foods was no more expensive or less expensive than Fairway. I was SHOCKED about that. Mostly because I have said that I felt that Fairway was such an affordable grocery store, and at the same time I have been convinced that Whole Foods was so expensive. And maybe Fairway's conventional items are less expensive. But when it comes to organics, the brands are identical and the price is nearly identical. Some things you pay 10 cents more for other you pay 10 cents less. It is a wash.

I am happy with everything that I bought at Whole Foods. There are a couple of items and brands that they carry that I cannot find anywhere else. so I will probably try to run over during a lunch break to buy a bottle of prized oil or a great cheese. but I don't need to go out of my way to get all my groceries at Whole Foods. Heck, Fairway has a parking lot. And to me that is huge!

But I think the thing that stood out the most to me was that all the brands of organic items were exactly identical. Whole Foods did not have an expanded selection that was apparent to me. That says to me what I have heard for a long time. That there really aren't as many organic options in this country. For the millions of people in this country only a small percentage can eat food that is not conventionally grown. Not because of price, but because there is not enough supply. But my generation is coming. Our demand of organic food is growing because we are all seeing the effects of the 'modern' way of life. So much progress has been made recently, but we have a long way to go before we can proclaim that every child in this country has access to foods that have been created at every level in a way that preserves the land for their future.

Local or Organic or ????

As yesterday dawned I was pretty sure that I had a direct path ahead of me. Buy more organics and buy more from the farmer's market. But through the course of the day it became apparent that my clarity had become a little cloudy.

Although I have been shopping at the Inwood Farmer's Market for a couple of years now and I have loved the high quality food, I had never actually asked the question 'Is your food organic?' I just naturally assumed that because these farmer's were pursuing the avenue of selling their fare at the farmer's market rather than contacting a supermarket distributor, that they must be organic. I also see all the folks from my neighborhood that I know from the CSA, and I know that they prize organic foods like I do. Surely the fact that other health minded folks I know shopped there, that MUST mean that everything was organic!

I have known for sometime about the USDA organic program. I know because of Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, that family farms must pay a government certification company a lot of money to become certified organic, so they can stick that USDA ORGANIC logo on all their produce. Many family run farms simply do not make enough money to pay for the certification process, but their food is organic nonetheless. My CSA makes no effort to hide the fact that they fall into this category, and I always assumed that the folks at my farmer's market did too.

Well, I got to asking people. There were several stands that were obvious. Milk Thistle is labeled as organic, Bread Alone Breads too are labeled. The mill selling beans and flour are all labeled. The turkey however....the turkeys were not given hormones and antibiotics, but they did not eat organic feed. So they are not organic, even though theirs is a better practice than at most conventional animal farms. The apples are grown with both chemical fertilizers and pesticides. I have heard from my own CSA that growing fruits organically are especially challenging because there are so many other critters besides us that like fruit. Those buggies just get to it first. All of the vegetable stands sold veggies that were not sprayed with pesticides, but they all used chemical fertilizers. There was one exception, Hawthorne Valley Farm sells organic yogurts and breads and other delicious goodies. They are a not for profit biodynamic farm in Ghent, NY and they were selling organic salad mix. But that was it, no other veggies for sale. It was pricey, but I bought it.

So there I was at the market feeling a little lead astray. But not rightly so, none of these farms had ever lead me to believe that they were certified organic. None of them labeled their food with a misleading label. However I was blissfully happy to assume that they were organic when they weren't. But I didn't feel that I was left with much of a choice. I supposed I could have gone to my supermarket and bought all organic veggies that were trucked in from California. Those veggies would have been from upstanding but nonetheless factory farms like Earthbound farms who grow food in huge monocultures and manage to turn a huge profit. They are wonderful farms that started out small and grew through success. But I don't like that whole 3,000 mile trip that they make across country. Not only is it an amazing waste of gas, but I get fewer days to enjoy my food because it is older by the time it arrives in Manhattan. And the nutrients in food diminishes with each moment after it has been harvested. I have bought potatoes at the farmer's market that were in the ground 5 hours before I bought them (the farmer told me).

And furthermore, buying local means that my food dollar will stay within the economy of New York State. When I purchase a California grown carrot, my grocery store gets one chunk of my food dollar, a distributor or importer gets another chunk and that CA farm gets the last chunk. I am not sure whose chunks are big or little , but I know a thing or two about the wholesale industry, the profit is divided up amongst the people that connect your product to you.

Today I have decided that local is more important than organic. I was hoping that my choices would be more clear. I envisioned a big yellowish-maybe-slightly-orangish crooked carrot that had a pair of evil eyes that were red and swirling around. I would know NOT to buy that carrot because it was bad news. But the choices are not that easy. And it doesn't seem like anyone is talking about all this gray in the marketplace. They are just making black and white statements. Buy more of this and less of that. Eat this, and not that.

We all live in gray. I think the most important thing for each of us is to ask the questions and try and make your way though the cloud.